Three admit killing Palestinian teen
Three Jewish detainees suspected of murdering a Palestinian youth have confessed to the crime, police said Monday, as Israel embarked on a wave of national soul searching over what appeared to be a racially motivated revenge attack.
A day after announcing a dramatic breakthrough in a case that led to rioting in Jerusalem and elsewhere, investigators said the three had re-enacted the murder of Mohammed Abu Khdeir, 16, at the site where his badly burnt body was found last Wednesday.
Police arrested six Israelis on Sunday in a development that appeared to bolster the belief of Mohammed’s family that he had been targeted by Jewish extremists in retribution for the murders of three Israeli teenagers, whose bodies were found in the West Bank two days earlier. The Palestinian youth is said to have been beaten and burnt alive after being seized outside his home in East Jerusalem.
Three of those held were said to be minors. Shin Bet, Israel’s domestic intelligence service, has been questioning all six suspects, the leader of whom was reported by Ynet, an Israeli news website, to be the son of an ultra- Orthodox rabbi from Jerusalem.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu telephoned the dead Palestinian’s father to offer condolences. “We denounce all brutal behaviour; the murder of your son is abhorrent and cannot be countenanced by any human being,” he told Hussein Abu Khdeir, according to a statement issued by his office.
Khdeir said: “Tons of people called me to apologize for what happened to my son. Some were crying. But I don’t know if Netanyahu was one of them.”
The prime minister’s intervention followed a series of agonized newspaper editorials, including one co-authored by Shimon Peres, the outgoing Israeli president, and his soon-to-be anointed successor, Rueven Rivlin, about the murder’s deeper meaning.
“The choice is in our hands,” they wrote. “To give in to the destructive world view posed to us by the racists and the extremists, or to fight it unconditionally.”
The case continued to divert attention from events in Gaza, where the Israeli military said it targeted three hidden rocket launchers Monday as tensions between Israel and the enclave’s Hamas rulers continued to mount.
The Israeli strikes followed the launch of more than a dozen missiles and mortars toward southern Israel earlier in the day, none of which caused any casualties. They came after overnight Israeli air raids left eight Palestinian militants dead, including six members of Hamas who were killed in a targeted missile strike on a tunnel near Rafah in southern Gaza.
The conflict has caused a widening split in Netanyahu’s coalition government, with right-wingers, led by Avigdor Lieberman, the foreign minister, urging an extensive military campaign against Hamas in Gaza in the face of the Israeli prime minister’s pleas for caution.
The disagreement burst into the open Monday when Lieberman announced that he was withdrawing his Yisrael Beiteinu party from a formal pact with Netanyahu’s Likud Party following a row with the prime minister at Sunday’s cabinet meeting.